Although at present the case for an English origin of the baryton cannot be
proved beyond the shadow of doubt, there is one respect in which an early
English connection is beyond question. The three earliest - and quite
independent - accounts in the 1640s mention the instrument and its technique in
an English context, and two of them mention Walter Rowe as its player (one
explicitly, the other implictly). What I hope to do in this paper is relate
what we can glean from the earliest sources of the music, two tablatures now in
Kassel and in St Petersburg, with what is known about Walter Rowe's
professional life.

First, Walter Rowe the baryton player. In February 1641, the Cornish sea
captain Peter Mundy wrote in his journal:

A Barretone, an Instrument of Musicke.

Att my being here in Coninxberg I spake with one Walter Row, cheiffe
Musitian to the Marquis of Brandenburg, by whom I was Freindly enterteyned.
Among the rest of his Instruments hee had one Named a Barretone, itt being a
base violl with addition of many wire strings, which run from end to end under
the Finger board, through the F belly of the Instrumentt, which are to be
strucke with the thumbe of the stopping hand: very Musicall, and concordant
with the violl, like 2 Instruments att once, the playing on the one being no
hinderance to the other. Itt had also sundry other wire strings about the head
and by the Fingerboard; but these and the viol cannot both be plaide att once,
beecause they must be strucke with the playing hand, soe that they answear one
another very harmoniously. In Fine, a very costly Fair Instrument, and sweet
solemne Musicke.

Walter Rowe was indeed the Marquis, or Elector, of Brandenburg's chief
musician. Born somewhere in England in 1584 or 1585 (his English background has
yet to be explored), he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Brandenburg court in
1614, and served there until his death in 1671 at the age of 86. There are - or
were before World War II - many documents in the German State Archives
concerning his employment which show, among other things, the extent of Rowe's
activities as player and teacher of the viol, at that time regarded
predominantly as an `English' instrument, and which thus document his seminal
influence on the German history of the instrument.

Rowe served under three Brandenburg Electors, Johann Sigismund (reigned
1608-1619), Georg Wilhelm (1619-1640) and the `Great Elector', Friedrich
Wilhelm (1640-1688). From the documents published by Carl Sachs in his 1910
thesis, Musik und Oper am kurbrandenburgischen Hof (Berlin, 1910/R
1977), we can see a steady stream of young German viol players being trained up
by Rowe, or (from about 1647) his assistant, Johann Peter Gärtner, and
employed in the Kapelle. [
TABLE 1] It is important to stress that this list is only provisional and probably very incomplete, being based on
research done by Sachs a century ago - further work in the archives may reveal
even more such activity.

Leaving aside Rowe's general duties at Berlin and Königsberg [now
Kaliningrad, Lithuania], let us now look at Rowe's special skills and the basis
of his great reputation. He was a highly-gifted viol player and teacher, with
the organisational talent to run a large and complex musical establishment. But
in focussing on his viol playing we immediately encounter the familiar problem
of nomenclature.

The first-known piece of music attributable to Rowe is a short courant for
solo viol in tablature which he entered in an autograph album in Hamburg in
August 1614 (probably on his way to Berlin to take up his post). This is what
we English would describe as `lyra-viol' music. Quite what the Germans or
French would have called it at the time is another matter. In 1627 the council
of Nuremburg provided funds for Theophil Staden to study the `viola bastarda'
with Rowe in Berlin. Without wishing to enter into a great debate about the
matter, I would like to suggest that this instrument was probably the same as
the one for which Rowe's Hamburg courante was written 13 years before. That is,
an English lyra viol fitted with sympathetic strings in the manner described
independently by several authorities, and under the heading `ViolBastarda' by
Praetorius in 1619, though not the type used in general by today's players (mainly because no instruments of this type
have survived to this day).

In terms of music rather than instrument, the term `viola bastarda' has a
special meaning and also a generic one: the special meaning is the Italian
technique developed in the 1580s of basing a virtuoso solo performance on the
polyphonic voices of a madrigal or motet, switching from one to another
throughout the performance and elaborating each in turn; the generic meaning is
as a designation on part-books especially of church music in 17th-century
Germany, where there is little to distinguish these from other parts of similar
range. This latter aspect has not, I think, yet been adequately researched.
(The rediscovery of a large collection of manuscript part-books and scores from
the Breslau Stadtbibliothek, many of which have parts labelled `Viola
Bastarda', may enable some general features to emerge.)

The viola bastarda and the English lyra viol may have remained distinct in
one sense: viola bastarda music, while it `borrows' from many polyphonic
voices, was almost entirely single-line music; that for lyra viol, on the other
hand, was predominantly (although by no means exclusively) chordal in style.
Whether this implies an organological distinction (a flatter bridge for the
lyra viol?) or not I leave to others. It may imply a further musical
distinction in that viola bastarda music in general requires accompaniment,
whereas the bulk of lyra viol music is for a solo instrument. These features
relate lyra viol music closely to that of the lute, as Tobias Hume famously
declared in `The First Part of Ayres' in 1605: `And from henceforth, the
statefull instrument Gambo Violl, shall with ease yeeld full various and as
devicefull Musicke as the Lute.' (In 1607 he replaced the words `as the Lute'
by the even stronger phrase `as any other Instrument'.)

Among the many viol-players engaged during Rowe's employment at the
Brandenburg court two at least had English connections: Valentine Flood was an
Englishman who was also employed as a town wait (Hofkunstpfeifer) in
Königsberg, and may have had connections with the English
Comoedianten who were so popular in Germany; and Dietrich Stoeffken, who
had served the English court from 1629, at first as one of Queen Henrietta
Maria's mostly French musicians, until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642
when he came to Berlin. (He returned to English Royal service in 1660 at the
Restoration of the Stuart monarchy.) Of Valentine Flood's music (if he composed
at all) we have nothing, but everything by Stoeffken that has survived is solo
viol music, frequently transmitted in tablature manuscripts. (We know that he
also composed duets for two `leero-way' viols, but these are lost.)

Stoeffken was an international star. When he and Rowe came to The Hague for
the marriage of the Great Elector to the Stadhouder's daughter in 1646, shortly
before the musicians arrived Constantijn Huygens, writing to Mersenne, could
barely contain his excitement at the prospect of hearing Stoeffken and `another
[Rowe, who] does more on a viol fitted with brass strings behind the neck and
elsewhere' (i.e. the three-ranked baryton). In the event, when Huygens heard
the two players he was so impressed by Stoeffken's playing that he failed to
leave any account of Rowe's playing and his baryton:

The violist is called
Stephkins, and has enormous skill on this instrument on which I considered
myself to excel in this country up to now, but I don't consider myself worthy
to pull off his boots. You've heard many good things, but this would amaze
you.

(It's worth adding that it was probably on this occasion that the eminent
French viol player, Nicholas Hotman, declined to play in front of Rowe and
Stoeffken, as Huygens somewhat scathingly observed in a letter to a musical
friend some years later.)

Turning to Rowe's baryton itself we are faced with an essential difficulty:
there is no way at present of knowing whether in 1614 he brought with him from
England the idea of plucking the exposed sympathetic strings behind the
neck of a normal lyra viol with his left-hand thumb, or a modified
instrument which we could call a true baryton. Mersenne's 1644 account,
referring to King James's interest, clearly implies that the hybrid
bowed/plucked string technique - which seems to be the true defining
characteristic of the baryton - was known in England before 1625 and before
spreading elsewhere. Possibly, however, Mersenne was intending to refer to
James's son Charles (who unlike his father had a lively interest in music), but
it is also possible that Rowe himself was involved with the early development
of the instrument in England before he left in 1614.

Rowe could have taken a further part in the development of the baryton from
a modified lyra viol to the more complex instrument described by Mundy. Since,
as we shall see, the central musical source, the Kassel baryton tablature,
contains music for the more advanced instrument, perhaps we should look at this
crucial development in some detail.

The three-ranked baryton adds to the `viol + theorbo' combination of the
modified lyra viol an extra `harp' or `psaltery' element. According to Mundy's
account (`Itt had also sundry other wire strings about the head and by the
Fingerboard') the extra rank of strings was not mounted on the belly of the
instrument, but parallel to the bowed strings, and therefore it must have been
on a separate neck. This is different from the disposition of the baryton
famously described by Daniel Speer in 1687:

This instrument is equipped with lute strings [presumably of gut] in
addition to the normal bowed and underlying strings. The lute strings are
strung on the right side of the top of the instrument and are plucked by the
little finger of the right hand. (Carol Gartrell's translation)

The principle of a set of strings mounted on the belly and played like a
psaltery survives today in the Ukranian bandoura, in which the tuning of these
strings is chromatic, although in its 19th-century version it was diatonic, and
thus required fewer strings. [PICTURE 1]

A significant English instrument of this sort was the Poliphant, or
Polyphone, no examples of which have survived, which was said by Playford to
have been invented by Daniel Farrant. We are lucky to have a crude sketch of
the instrument with a brief description by Randle Holme from around 1680 (?)
[PICTURE 2], and a more detailed description by James Talbot from the end of
the century. The later description is of a somewhat more complex instrument
than that in the Holme account. The descriptions are both confusing, but Talbot
lets slip the interesting information that one of the ranks of open strings is
to be played with the player's left thumb while the left-hand fingers manage
the frets on the fingerboard. The right-hand thumb managed another rank of open
bass strings whilst all four fingers of the right hand (in contrast to lute
technique which used only two fingers at this period) play the fretted strings.
Was Rowe's baryton a bowed Polyphone? Application of such additional stringing
to a viol in England before 1614 would not perhaps be an altogether surprising
development, although it should be stressed that none of this is evidence that
it actually in fact happened there.

Another possibility, of course, is that Rowe brought the left-hand thumb
technique - maybe a specially-adapted lyra viol - with him to Germany in 1614,
and introduced the third rank of strings himself. That this was possible is
suggested by the specialities of some of his Berlin colleagues. In 1615 the
Brandenburg court employed Peter Rutte, `Geigernn, Lauttenn, Citternn,
Pandorenn, Viola-gamben undtt allerley seitten spielende Instrument Macher'.
That list of Rutte's instrument-building accomplishments includes the cittern
and Pandora (bandora), both wire-strung instruments, alongside the viol. Berlin
under Rowe's musical direction might have been something of a centre for
wire-strung instruments. `Cytharists' (which I take to mean cittern-players
rather than lutenists, who are described in the documents cited by Sachs as
`Lautenisten') and `Pandorists' were:

The first two of these would undoubtedly have played the wire-strung Irish
harp which was also that in common use in the English court at the time. [Peter
Holman, `The Harp in Stuart England: New Light on William Lawes's Harp
Consorts', Early Music 15 (1987), 188-203.] So the Berlin air was
certainly full of the sound of plucked wire strings as well as bowed, and the
opportunity certainly existed to commission a three-ranked baryton from a court
instrument-maker such as Rutte. Perhaps a detailed examination of whatever
Brandenburg records survive will reveal still more about wire-strung
instruments in use in the court Kapelle.

As well as training up new viol-players, Rowe was music-teacher to the
children of Elector Johann Sigismund, in particular the princesses Louise
Charlotte (born 1617) and Hedwig Sophie (born 1623), sisters of the future
Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm. A manuscript music book with a starting date
of 1632 and largely written by Rowe for Louise Charlotte and now in the library
of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg [MS XX.L.5], contains not only
keyboard music in tablature (not in Rowe's hand) and didactic exercises and
diagrams [interestingly, the `gamut' is presented in an identical form to that
written by John Dowland into Margaret Board's lute book], but also several
German, French and English songs, some with melodies or harmonisations by Rowe
(signed `W:R:' or, in one case, `Wal:R:'). Some of the English songs are
supplied with German texts (amongst them a setting of the ballad-tune
`Walsingham' and a vocal version of a popular English masque-dance, possibly by
Robert Johnson, known as `Kit's Almaine'). Among the songs is Thomas Campion's
`Though you are younge and I am ould', with its original English text and
preceded by a version with written-out embellishment which was presumably
supplied by Rowe as an example to his young pupil (for whom he also provided
vocal exercises).

Louise Charlotte's younger sister Hedwig Sophie married Duke Wilhelm IV of
Hessen-Kassel in 1649. It is surely no coincidence that the only known
manuscript of music for the three-ranked baryton survives in the Kassel library
[D-Kl 2º MS Mus. 61L1] (where it carries on a flyleaf the
confusing inscription `für die Mandoline'!). The first section of this
manuscript, which unfortunately I have not yet examined at first hand, shows
every sign of having been copied out from an earlier exemplar; this recopying
probably took place around 1653. We know that the Elector of Brandenburg
occasionally provided instruments for his sister (a harp is mentioned as a gift
in an inventory drawn up by Rowe in 1667); possibly a Rowe pupil who played the
baryton passed from Berlin to Kassel, or even Hedwig Sophie herself was a
player on the instrument.

The Kassel MS [Lit: Fruchtmann; Gartrell] contains a total of 53 pieces for
baryton in French tablature (there are two pieces for theorbo, one of which is
also present in lute and baryton versions). Two are labelled `W:R:', initials
that can only be those of Walter Rowe himself. However, one of these two, like
a further eight pieces in the manuscript, has been identified by
François-Pierre Goy as an arrangement of lute music - a natural source
for baryton music which we will encounter further in the St Petersburg
manuscript. Of the remainder, at least another 18 can be shown by concordance
to be arrangements of music for solo viol, by composers such as Simon Ives,
John Jenkins, Dietrich Stoeffken, William Young and the French viol-player
Dubuisson, where a bass line - often derived from the lowest-sounding `voice'
of the tablature, but sometimes newly added - has been supplied on the
thumb-plucked rank of strings. An example, showing the addition of quite fast
divisions (not a distinctive feature of baryton music, one might think), is the
version of Simon Ives's masque-dance, `The Fancy'. [EXAMPLE 1a - PLAY
TAPE]

It's possible that Ives's piece was arranged from a lute tablature: the
final note [see facsimile EXAMPLE 1b] is written as an `a' below the six-line
staff, a notation found elsewhere in the MS, and one that corresponds precisely
to the same pitch on a 10-course lute in the old renaissance tuning, still in
frequent use in Germany at this period. The use of the thumb-plucked baryton
basses is quite interesting here: not only is the music's bass-line very
adequately supplied, but there are variations in the bass in the divisions of
each strain (cf bars 4-5 with bars 12-13). In the second half of the piece, the
`breaking bass', with its suggestion of a third inner part, gives way to a much
simplified bass when the bowed strings are engaged in rapid figuration. This
seems, although I am not a baryton player, to be a highly idiomatic
arrangement. The freedom evident in the plucked basses - which are (at least to
some extent) chromatic rather than merely diatonic like the theorbo's basses -
allows for them to enter into the polyphonic interplay rather more than is
characteristic for lute music, for example. The next example, the anonymous
piece on folio 5 of the MS, shows this well. [EXAMPLE 2 - PLAY TAPE] The bass
not only supports the bowed strings, but actually answers it in imitation,
giving a pretty explicit suggestion of two instruments playing simulaneously.
Again, this is handled carefully: when the player bows double-stops, for
example, the bass is always simple. (I should point out that in these chordal
passages, as with all transcriptions of lyra-viol music or lute music,
conventional musical notation is not very helpful in showing the
quasi-independent movement of voices; notes were often allowed to `ring' longer
than they are notated - a technique that was enhanced by the sympathetic
vibration of open wire strings. This effect is impossible to notate; I have
chosen to use the kind of notation normal in bass-viol sources of the period
that are not in tablature.)

Only three of the Kassel pieces are for three-ranked baryton, and they are
transcribed as your examples 3-5 [EXAMPLES 3, 4 & 5]. There is obviously
not enough stylistic evidence available from the single lyra-viol courante in
the Hamburg autograph album, the songs and the two initialed Kassel baryton
pieces, to prove it beyond question, but circumstantially Rowe seems the most
likely candidate for a composer. In any case, they certainly fit Mundy's
description of `sweet solemne Musicke' in which the bowed strings and those
plucked by the left hand and the `sundry other wire strings about the head and
by the Fingerboard' of the `very costly Fair Instrument' `answer one another
very harmoniously.' I would also say that the music sounds unmistakably English
to my - perhaps prejudiced - ears.

Hedwig Sophie of Hessen-Kassel's sister, Louise Charlotte, for whom Rowe
compiled the St Petersburg music book, was married in 1645 to Jakob, Duke of
Kurland, a tiny Baltic state now part of Lithuania. The music book (known
sometimes in German literature as the `Baltisches Liederbuch') is now in the
library of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, having been part of the Ducal
library from the castle of Kurland's former capital, Mitau, which was
appropriated around 1716 by Prince Menshikov to form the basis of the
newly-founded Academy's collection. There seems every chance (although there is
no proof for it) that the other surviving baryton tablature manuscript, the
so-called `Swan' manuscript [ADVERT], St Petersburg Academy of Sciences MS O
Nº 124, also came from Mitau, and thus has a Rowe connection.

The principal problem with this suggestion is that the binding of the MS is
dated 1614, a date consistent with the watermarks in its paper. However,
although the nearest repertory to 1614 in the MS (and indeed the copying layer
first entered into it) is a series of pieces for 10-course lute, which are
loosely concordant with Robert Ballard's 1614 collection and other sources up
to about 1620, the baryton repertory was definitely added later, certainly
after 1630, perhaps as late as the period of recopying of the first part of the
Kassel MS, around 1653. It is at present impossible to be sure about these
datings, but a date substantially later than 1614 seems to be more likely for
the baryton music at least.

This manuscript could have been in the possession of a musical Mitau
courtier, or even someone from the Brandenburg court who accompanied Louise
Charlotte to Kurland after her wedding in 1645. This person was a performer -
presumably skilful - on:

10-course lute in both old and new French tunings (about 150 pieces in the
MS);
12-course lute in various tunings (listed at the beginning of the MS; about
20 pieces);
lyra viol in various tunings (3 pieces);
baryton (on which the lyra-viol music could, of course, have been played;
22 pieces, half of which are made by modifying the lute tablature - see
below);
keyboard (probably spinet or harpsichord; 13 pieces).

Again, the number of true baryton pieces in the MS is small. Most pieces
are arrangements or adaptations of lute or viol pieces, often made by writing
baryton thumb-plucked-note numbers directly onto the pre-written tablature and
using the relevant lute or viol tuning - a surprisingly successful strategy.
(Occasionally this leaves some chords on non-adjacent strings to be tackled by
the player, but this is by no means unheard-of in lyra-viol music.) As an
example of this procedure `in progress', so to speak, the next example (St
Petersburg MS, No. 94, f. 52) shows a lute piece to which baryton basses have
been added in the second half only, without any alteration whatsoever to the
music. [EXAMPLE 6]

There are only three pieces that look as though they may have been composed
for the baryton, although even here we may be dealing with skilful and
idiomatic arrangements of lyra-viol music.

[EXAMPLES 7, 8 & 9]

Again, this music sounds English, and François-Pierre Goy has
pointed to the use in the tablature of the `ÿ' form of `i' which is common
in English tablature manuscripts but rare elsewhere in Europe. So it may have
been copied from a manuscript written by an Englishman. The second piece, an
alman, is especially English in character, and seems most likely to be an
arrangement of a dance-tune like those by Ives and others found elsewhere here
and in the Kassel MS, such as `The Fancy'.

Whether this music, too, is by Walter Rowe is, of course, impossible to
prove (especially since it's for the simpler form of baryton), although given
the sound of the music, this seems more than likely.